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Last week I visited Pii2011 in San Jose with our Chief Privacy Officer (aka @horax). Pii2011 is the second of its kind, an exciting conference dedicated to exploring privacy, identity, and innovation. The conference was founded by (among others) Natalie Fonseca (@techpolicy), a well-known technological and political activist from the US. (more)

I just found this excellent piece from Neil Young on Advertising (starting from 0:49*).

“They don’t know that you know what’s on”
How could anyone describe better what Advertising on the Internet has to deliver these days? People learned that the web can listen. Facebook delivers an unparalleled experience of relevance, way better than anything Google ever could and will do. Amazon sells more and more based on recommendations and feedback from users and so do other shops all over the net.

And on the professional side we see a revolution in efficiency and accountability of advertising because we run advertising based on algorithms and platforms that try to figure out what is on and what people might be interested in – adjusting our models and assumptions from click to click.

Basically all what we do is try to act on Youngs statement. We want to create advertising that takes into account that people know what’s on.

Sometimes you work towards a goal for a long time, indeed sometimes for a very long time. By which I don’t mean “Internet very long” (i.e. 2-3 weeks), but rather a period of months and years. You have the objective in front of you and you follow this path despite numerous obstacles, doubts, various bottlenecks, setbacks and warnings.

Today, nugg.ad has published a case study and at the same time announced the start of its Open Targeting Platform.

What’s it all about? The Open Targeting Platform is a combination of solutions, on which we have worked for a very long time.

We find ourselves at the beginning of the data economy – at least as far as the Internet and advertising are concerned. An ever-increasing proportion of online display advertising is being controlled by qualified data, target groups are being defined and adjusted by means of measured data and websites are being newly created and optimised based on usage data.

Some of the most successful online companies are data companies – Google surely must take first place, but Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and so on are also very prominent. In addition, many companies who until now ignored and even naively dumped their valuable data are slowly starting to realise what treasures they possess – and are starting to think about monetisation models. This is the case, for example, among online marketers who are beginning to realise during the crisis that they can generate something online that would otherwise require armies of researchers in conventional media: target group data.

Recently, one managing director of a large media agency said in conversation:“Our future business model will presumably be in working with data and no longer media purchasing and planning”.(more)

As one example Schmidt explained a very interesting service Google is working on – which can be used to explain the relationship between targeting and search.

The huge business Google built on his search business is in fact nothing else than a primitive but yet powerful and clear targeting approach. Show people ads according to their interests – which are derived from their searches.

The huge monetization Google sees from this is not only based on the fact that a lot of people are using the search engine and therefore Google has a lot of contacts and reach. It even more has to do with the fact that Google ads are much more relevant than other ads people see online.